Peter J Bentley: We should thank the unsung heroes of tech

This article was taken from the April 2012 issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional
content bysubscribing
online.

The real pioneers of our digital age are too important, too
significant to forget. They are visionaries who see the world for
what it might be, and they have the ambition and drive to make it
happen. There's just no mistaking them… Is there? Take the quirky
and misunderstood pioneer who loved to give amazing presentations
of his inventions to the industry: the mouse, the graphical user
interface, hyperlinks, windows, the word processor. He was a man
with a lifelong vision that profoundly affected his work; a man who
was fired despite his success. Not Steve
Jobs. Not an employee of Xerox PARC. He was Douglas
Engelbart.

Or the ambitious pioneer of computers and creator of the first
practical programmable computer in the world, who studied
mathematics in Cambridge in the 1930s. This man helped shape
programming languages, inventing the subroutine, macros and
symbolic labels. Not John von Neumann or Alan Turing. Not John Mauchly or anyone from the Moore School.
An engineer called Maurice
Wilkes.

How about one of the pioneers of the internet who helped connect
the world? He is a man who was responsible for turning the American
ARPANET into an "inter" net by linking to the first remote-host
computer, based in the UK. A man who continues to help developing
countries link to the net today. Not Vint Cerf or Tim Berners-Lee. A modest professor of computer science called
Peter
Kirstein.

These are just three of many names we should be remembering. Far
too many of these creators of the computer age have been
overlooked. We remember John Logie Baird and George Stephenson but
forget the more recent pioneers.

Does it matter who created our digital revolution? I think it
does. If you don't know where something comes from, how can you
encourage more of the same innovation? Do Bill Gates and Steve Jobs
deserve to get so much credit for the amazing technology we use
today? Does Apple or even Xerox PARC
really deserve the credit for advances such as the graphical user
interface or the mouse? Does John von Neumann deserve the credit
for designing the architecture in every microprocessor? Almost
certainly not.

In reality, the records show that many of the ideas behind our
technology came from a few scientists and engineers in research
institutions or universities around the world. These researchers
were driven by a desire to solve problems, to make technological
magic a reality. They had little interest in money, and less
interest in recognition. In their own way, they were the virtuosos
of their fields, the maestros with no audience.

These people were never billionaires. They never made it to the
cover of Forbes. They never had action figures made of them. They were never honoured in lavish
ceremonies. But each of them helped to create the technological
marvels you use every day. Could we not at least remember their
names?

Peter J Bentley is a computer scientist at UCL and author of
the forthcomingDigitized(Oxford).

Edited by Dan Smith

Comments

It's generally agreed that Maurice Wilkes got his basic ideas for how to build a computer from Eckert and Mauchly - he attended the Moore School Lectures, which they conducted at Penn the summer after ENIAC was unveiled, and then came back to Cambridge with the specific aim of using these ideas to win the race. The Manchester 'baby' was actually the first stored program computer, though Wilkes does have the first claim to one that was more than a toy incarnation of Turing's universal machine.